Parmenides and the Origin of Metaphysics offers a novel and comprehensive solution to one of the oldest interpretive puzzles in the history of philosophy: the so-called “problem of the Doxa.” This puzzle stems from an apparent conflict between the main part of Parmenides’ poem—which seems to imply that nothing is generated, divisible, or moving—and the cosmological part of the poem, called “the Doxa,” which seems to presuppose the opposite. The standard solution over the last century has been to…
Read moreParmenides and the Origin of Metaphysics offers a novel and comprehensive solution to one of the oldest interpretive puzzles in the history of philosophy: the so-called “problem of the Doxa.” This puzzle stems from an apparent conflict between the main part of Parmenides’ poem—which seems to imply that nothing is generated, divisible, or moving—and the cosmological part of the poem, called “the Doxa,” which seems to presuppose the opposite. The standard solution over the last century has been to marginalize the Doxa and hold that according to Parmenides the theory presented there is somehow logically or rationally incoherent. This book defends an alternative solution: the two parts of the poem are not at odds with each other, because each of them is about a distinct kind of thing. While the cosmological part is about the things we encounter in the world around us, the main part is about the underlying nature or reality of such things. By working carefully and systematically through the poem’s most challenging passages, the book shows how this alternative solution makes surprisingly good sense of them all. It also shows, at a deeper level, how continuous the original discipline of metaphysics has been, from the start, with the theory-building enterprise of the empirical sciences.
